Big Mouth

by Deborah Halverson

  Moving to the set of doors I’d come in through, I was just starting to push down on the exit bar when a door on the other side of the gym crashed open against a wall.

  “Shane!” It was Coach Hunt. Short like Shane but densely muscled, the man stalked across the gym like a bulldozer in a rose garden. “What are you doing still stretching them out? It’s seven-oh-two, you should be into drills by now. If you want to lead, missy, you need to act like a leader. Go join Esperaldo. Move!” He jabbed a finger at the Finn nearest him in the circle. “Blayne, take these girls through bottom man drills.”

  “Coach Hunt, sir, I’m Wayne.”

  “That’s what I said. Hurry up!”

  “Yes, sir! You heard the man. Partner up, ladies! Let’s go!”

  “Not you, Blayne. C’mere. I need the new warm-ups moved to the equipment room. The keys are in the office. Usual spot. Double time!”

  “Yes, sir!” The other Finn took off at a run.

  I slipped through the door to the outside world, squinting in the budding sunlight. No way did I want Coach Hunt spotting me and thinking I was spying on his precious practice or something. I wasn’t interested in wrestling, and I certainly wasn’t interested in being sent up the bleacher stairs to pull a Humpty Dumpty in front of the whole wrestling team.

  After all, I had a rep to protect now.

  “Shermie, wake up.”

  I opened my eyes. Gardo’s face was inches from mine.

  “Wake up, man. What are you doing here?”

  I blinked rapidly, trying to keep out the bright sun. It was high and strong now, reflecting off everything. When I’d ducked out of the gym and sat down against this wall to wait, the sun was climbing fast but the moon still dominated the sky. I must’ve dozed off. My stomach rumbled, reminding me that I’d rushed out this morning without breakfast. “What time is it? Is practice over?”

  “Yeah. It’s after nine. Coach cut practice short today. Shane pulled a groin muscle, the poor baby.”

  He reached out his hand and helped me pull myself up. My legs had stiffened while I dozed.

  “I swear,” he said, “you’d think Shane is paralyzed or something. I don’t know who took it harder, him or Coach. For crying out loud, when you’re an athlete, things happen. Get over it or get out.”

  “What a wuss.”

  “Seriously.” He slung a backpack over his shoulder. He’d changed his clothes to gray sweats and a gray hoodie with a big black T-shirt over it.

  “Hey, that’s my Galactic Warriors shirt.” I’d forgotten he wore it home last night.

  “I know. I like it.” He swung his arms around like he was flagging down a plane. “It’s nice and roomy. I’ll get it back to you after I wash it.”

  “Keep it. I don’t like black, anyway.” I slapped some blades of grass from my shorts. “I hope you don’t mind me stalking you at practice, but I wanted to ask you something and I kind of didn’t want to wait.”

  “No sweat. C’mon, talk and walk. I need to work out a kink.”

  Together we walked in the direction of the football stadium, which our school shared with the high school on the other side, Del Heiny High #3, home of the Black Cherry Heirlooms. There was a lot of shouting down on the field, and muffled music, like from bad stereo speakers. Every couple of steps, Gardo stuck his right leg out to the side and gave it a quick shake. “What gives?”

  “Well, you know how I want to beat Tsunami….”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, see, to do that I need to…well, the thing is, Lucy said…” Wow, this was pretty embarrassing, now that I had to say it out loud.

  “Spit it out. The best way to remove a Band-Aid is to just yank it.”

  We were rounding the fence into the stadium. I motioned for him to follow me to the metal railing in front of the home team bleachers. Yellow toilet paper was wrapped around the bar like wilted candy cane stripes. On the field below us, the high school’s marching band was drilling on the left, zigzagging like purple-shirted ants, holding instruments but not playing them. On the right, Black Cherry Heirloom cheerleaders were practicing a synchronized dance. Their boombox was blasting muffled, bass-heavy dance music as they jerked and froze, jerked and froze, smiling mechanically while their ponytails cracked like whips with each crisp move. Dark purple pom-poms were flying every which way, and so were purple-shirted somersaulting cheerleaders.

  “So what’s the big secret?” Gardo asked.

  “It’s not a secret, I just…I just want to know if you can help me lose my…this…” I took a deep breath. C’mon, Shermie, you have to do this. “…my belt of fat.”

  There. I’d done it. I’d ripped off the Band-Aid.

  Gardo looked down where my hand was resting, on my gut. How could he not? I’d practically told him to. Then he leaned over the railing next to me and rubbed his hand over his face.

  “You can answer any time now,” I said, feeling more mortified by the second.

  He moved his hand from his face and met my gaze. “Does Lucy know you’re asking me to help?”

  “No. That doesn’t matter, though, she’s not my coach anymore.” Gardo hadn’t heard us down the hall last night. He thought she’d left so suddenly because my Halloween candy reversal grossed her out.

  “I don’t know anything about graphing and HDB ratios,” he said.

  “You don’t need to. I have all the graphs I need. But those are for eating. What I need is for someone to tell me how to get rid of this.” I pulled up the front edge of my shirt, exposing my belly button—and all the belly around it. This is Gardo, I reminded myself, you can trust him. “My stomach can’t expand with this in the way. That’s why the skinny guys win the eating competitions, they don’t have a natural belt restricting them. I’ve seen pictures of them after a contest, and it’s like they’re about to give birth to quadruplets, their stomachs are so stretched out. If I’m going to beat Tsunami, I have to be able to expand.”

  “And you think I can help?”

  “You have to cut weight for wrestling. You know how to do this.” I lowered my shirt. “Will you help me? Please?”

  He stared out over the field, studying it intensely. The grass down there was a green too bright to be real. The crisp white yard lines were permanently painted, and the end zones were a deep Black Cherry Heirloom purple. In the center of each end zone was a giant Del Heiny Ketchup Company logo: a tomato outlined in white, with a big happy face grin and two humongous eyes, one winking like it knew some private joke.

  “You’d have to do everything I say,” Gardo finally said to the field. “And no back talk. I know how you are. You’re an athlete now, and athletes do what their coaches say, even if they don’t like it. Can you handle that?”

  “I’ll do whatever you say.” I crossed my heart and spit over my left shoulder.

  He stared at me hard for a moment. Then he nodded. “Okay, then, I’ll do it. I’ll be your weight coach.”

  “Yes!” I slapped him a high five and danced a little jig. The serious look disappeared from his face.

  Smiling, he pointed his finger firmly at my nose. “Just remember, anything I say.”

  “Anything.”

  I leaned back on the mustard-swirled railing, the flood of relief relaxing my shoulders. I hadn’t realized how tense they’d gotten. I looked over again at my buddy and smiled. Yeah, I’d done the right thing, trusting him. No way would I be able to do this if he hadn’t agreed to teach me what he knew.

  Across the field, the visitor bleachers were dotted with random people running the steps. I almost joked about them, but I caught myself before the words left my big mouth. I had to remember that I hadn’t seen Gardo running punishment laps in the gym. He could trust me, too. But hey, at least someone had made Gardo run the bleachers. Those people on the visitor side were doing it voluntarily. What a bunch of whackos.

  A few feet away from us, a guy who was maybe in college showed up and set down a gym bag and a bottle of water. He took off his T-shir
t and started rolling his shoulders, forward and back, forward and back. The guy was cut.

  Gardo leaned in close to me and whispered, “Someday you’re gonna be ripped like that.”

  If only. “Give me a break.”

  “We’ll target your workouts, you’ll see. Ab work up the wazoo.”

  Mr. Olympia stopped rolling his shoulders and stepped over to the railing. He stretched a leg up over the top and then bent so far over it that his forehead touched his knee, like he was warming up for an act of Swan Lake.

  This time I was the one who leaned in and whispered. “Talk about a groin pull.”

  Gardo laughed. “C’mon, let’s go to my house. We’ve got some ab research to do.”

  I practically skipped back toward the stadium gate with him. I’d just recruited a ringer. Maybe Lucy was right; maybe last night was the eve of great new things for me. With Gardo as my coach, I’d be rid of this fat belt in a few weeks, and then there wouldn’t be anything between me and the Mustard Yellow Belt of International Hot Dog Eating, not even Tsunami and his fifty-three and three-quarters HDBs. It said so in the stars, didn’t it?

  “Where did you get these?” I asked Gardo.

  “They’re my sisters’.”

  We were sitting on his bedroom floor, my back against his big oak desk and his back against his bed, looking through a stack of magazines. Man-hater magazines, he called them. I could understand why. Every other article was “How to Train Your Boyfriend to Beg” or “How to Tell If Your Boyfriend Is a Cheater” or something anti-boyfriend like that.

  “This is what girls read?”

  “All day long.” He shook his head and got up off the floor, shoving a stack of folded clothes off his bed so he could lie across it while he rifled the pages of his magazine. “Sick, isn’t it?”

  “Truly.” I picked up another one and flipped through it.

  “‘My Prom Date from Hell.’”

  “‘Transform Your Boyfriend from a 2 to a 10.’”

  “‘How Playing Hard to Get Will Make Getting Him Easy.’”

  Jeez. And girls said guys’ magazines depict women badly.

  The articles that weren’t about how to hate your loser boyfriend were about makeup or dieting or exercising. That’s what we were looking through the magazines for. Not the makeup part, the dieting and exercise parts. Gardo said his sisters were always trying the workouts they found in these magazines. Their biggest beef was with their abs and their rears, and he said they swore by the exercises they got from these. I didn’t give a fig about my rear, it was the ab stuff I wanted to know. Between those tips and the stuff Coach Hunt was teaching Gardo, I would be smaller than Tsunami by Thanksgiving.

  “Here’s one that sounds good.” Gardo held up a picture of a girl with green circles over her eyes.

  “She’s got cucumbers on her face.”

  “Not that page. The other one.” That one had some hottie in a pink sports bra hanging off the end of a bed with her hands behind her head. He read the caption. “‘Thinking bikini? Quick ab crunches three mornings a week will minimize unsightly belly bulge.’”

  “Who’s thinking bikini?”

  “You are. At least for the purposes of our research, you are. Your belt of…you-know-what…isn’t on your shoulders, is it?” He ripped out that page. “Here, we’ll make a stack of the ones we might use.”

  I took the article and set it on the floor next to my knee, then went back to flipping through my man-hater rag. The issue was a Special RELATIONSHIP Edition! “Did you know that four out of five guys have considered cheating on their girlfriends?”

  “Get out.”

  “No, really, it says so right here. And four out of five girls like chocolate ice cream best.”

  “What’s that got to do with cheating boyfriends?”

  “I don’t know, but they’re in the same box. See?” I showed him the page with the colored squares and X’s through boys’ faces.

  “Weird. Hey, here’s another good one. ‘Trim your torso with this bejeweled Belly Buster from Queen’s Fit. With the heat action of a four-star sauna and the smooth curves of the Queen’s Fit Lady Slim girdle, the Belly Buster targets the stubbornest tummies with high-sweat, high-comfort dual latex action. For the sportswoman in all of us.’ It sounds like a fancy version of Coach Hunt’s Gut Wrap.”

  “What’s a Gut Wrap?”

  “That’s what he calls wrapping your stomach in plastic wrap to make you sweat off the weight.”

  “You want me to wrap myself in plastic wrap?”

  “That, or wear this girdle. I’ll let you have a choice on this one.”

  “Lucky me.” I took the magazine from him. The girdle looked comfortable—stretchy yet snug, and definitely smoothly curved. But I couldn’t do it; I couldn’t risk someone finding out I wore a girdle. That was the kind of thing that turned up in the National Enquirer after you were famous and ruined everything. It would kill the Thuff Enuff legend. “Bring on the plastic wrap.”

  “Good, I’ve already stocked up for myself. I’ll send you home with a box.” He went to his closet and pulled out a bulging paper grocery bag. There must have been a dozen boxes of Saran Wrap in there. He tossed me one. “We also need to talk about what you’re wearing.”

  “What’s wrong with what I’m wearing?”

  “Nothing…if you like that belt of yours. But if you’re serious about losing it, you need to get some sweats and hoodies like these.” He gestured to his outfit.

  “I’m serious. See?” I picked the ab article off the pile of potential exercises and waved it. “But we’re having a dry warm weather thingee. It’s eighty degrees out. Aren’t you hot?”

  “That’s the point. You think I’m dressed like this because I’m cold? They’re called sweats for a reason. Make sure you wear an undershirt under your T-shirt, too.”

  “And still wear the hoodie?”

  “Yes. You need to sweat out the weight. When we go running tomorrow, I want you wearing long johns, too.”

  “Running…” I nodded my head slowly. “Okay, I figured I’d have to do some running.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll start you out slow. Two miles only.” He reached into a dresser drawer and held up a pair of flannels. “Get these kind, they’re the thickest. And you’ll wear your hood over your head then, too. You lose nearly half your body heat through your head. We want to trap that in so you stay as hot as possible. I swear, Shermie, you’ve never sweat this much in your life. The weight will fall off, I guarantee it.”

  He lifted up his shirt and patted his sweaty belly with pride. It was way smaller than mine. I could see his ribs. “Then we’ll do sit-ups. I’m working on a six-pack, so I do three hundred. You’re new to this stuff, though, so we’ll keep that light, too. I started at one hundred a day.”

  One hundred? What had I gotten myself into? Lucy’s training had been hard, but at least that involved eating, not turning myself into a walking sauna. But I’d promised Gardo I’d do whatever he said, no question, and I meant it. I was serious about this. I was going to earn my legend. Stuff that in your horoscope, Lucy.

  After I tore out the picture of the Belly Buster—hey, you never know—I settled back into my spot against the desk. We spent the next two hours poring over magazines and ripping out pages with ab exercises. His sisters would probably be mad when they saw the carnage, but Gardo didn’t care. He had those girls wrapped around his little finger, just like every other female on the planet.

  A couple of times I asked for a snack break—I’d skipped breakfast because of his practice, after all—but he only let me have two pickles and some celery. I liked pickles, but they didn’t really fill the void for long. Gardo said they were good for me right now because, with them being mostly water, I wouldn’t have to worry about working off calories. So I ate them without complaining. Besides, Lucy’s graph had me scheduled for fifteen dogs tonight, so I needed to fast anyway. Fifteen HDBs required a lot of stomach space.

  When I r
ode my bike home that afternoon to change for my shift at Scoops, I felt like a new man. I was focused, I was motivated, and I was more excited about my eating career than ever. Gardo was going to help me beat the belt, and then I’d be world champion when I turned eighteen. I could practically hear hot dogs spitting on the Nathan’s Famous grill and smell the salty ocean air of Coney Island.

  At the intersection of Lakewood and Palm Avenue, I turned right instead of heading straight. I’d take the long way home and enjoy the breeze on my arms and legs for the last time. After that, I’d have to wear thermals and hoodies for a while.

  Plus the leisurely ride just felt good on my legs. They were loose now, all the wobble from my ride to Gardo’s practice that morning worked out. I could’ve pedaled forever. My leg muscles were doing their jobs; my lungs were breathing deep and long. Maybe this exercise stuff wasn’t so bad. Maybe I’d like running before school with Gardo. I’d be like Rocky, jogging through the streets of South Philly in his sweats and ski hat and taped-up wrists, only stopping long enough to slug slabs of frozen meat and race up a million steps in front of the Museum of Art. He went from Nobody to Champion, just like me. I was the Rocky Balboa of the Buffet Table. I was Sherman “Thuff Enuff” Thuff, the next Hot Dog–Eating Champion of the World….

  And the crowd goes wild. Thuff, Thuff, Thuff! The Champion of the World raises his arms up high, pumping his fists in victory. Thuff, Thuff, Thuff!

  My bike hit a rock and I dropped my hands back down onto the handlebars to steady it. A loud gurgle rumbled my stomach.

  I hear ya, Big Guy, I hear ya. The Hot Dog–Eating Champion of the World wouldn’t have minded a little food.

  * * *

  Ladies and Gentlemen, Friends and Fans…

  Welcome to Nathan’s Famous Fourth of July International Hot Dog–Eating Contest, the most anticipated eating event in the world. We’ve sure got a match-up for you this year!

  Dominating this twenty-eater table we have the reigning WORLD CHAMPION of hot dogs. Hailing all the way from Japan and weighing in at a mere 131 pounds, it’s the Mini Monsoon of Meat, the Tiny Tidal Wave of Teeth, the One…the Only…the Devastating…TSUNAMI!